The Kingpen, The Attorney, The Wife

An amusing and coy title, criminal conversation is used here to mean both adultery and mafiosi chatter on bugged telephones.

Well, most of the conversations the cops pick up come from one well-used bedroom. Assistant District Attorney Michael Welles is after the Faviola family.

His wife, Sarah Welles, is criminally conversing with smooth and studly Andrew Faviola, now the reputed head of New York's deadliest cabal.

Michael wants to put him away. His intentions are clear. So are Sarah's; who is boffing Faviola every Wednesday, which is when she has told hubby she attends teachers' meetings.

How'd she get caught up in this social gaffe? It was one of those naughty beachy things in an island paradise.

Meanwhile, Michael is activating his listening devices.

Consider a newly ordained Mafia kingpin who is only 28 years old and must control a crime syndicate that stretches into three New York boroughs. His pop is vacationing permanently in the Leavenworth federal penitentiary. Sonny boy has his hands full trying to keep the business on track while attempting to expand it into the ever-ready Colombian drug industry. As if that weren't enough of a challenge, along comes the sexually repressed wife of Manhattan's hottest ADA to complicate everyone's life.

Evan Hunter, who also writes detective novels as Ed McBain, has put together a fast-moving, highly suspenseful yarn of love, lust, deceit and double-cross that will satisfy the most jaded action junky. It's truly hot off the press for leisure summer reading.

- Art McMaster, a former resident of Newport News, lives in Valrico, Fla.